A REVOLUTION IN ADVERTISING! (C)1994 Alan M. Schwartz We are today faced with paired escalating catastrophes. On the one hand we have vast cadres of disaffected youth who will never achieve the existential security or even material wealth of their parents, the Baby Boomers. They are the Grunge Generations piercing their body parts, scarifying their flesh, branding their skin, tattooing their torsos, writhing in mosh pits, smoking toad and otherwise belligerently condemning the restrained, tasteful and conservative lifestyles of folks like Keith Richards and Ozzy Osbourne. On the other hand we have the advertising moguls of Madison Avenue who would drench their mothers in gasoline and set them ablaze in the center of Times Square to secure a fifteen second sound bite with an 85 rating and a 50 share for their client. The former are forever poor and melancholy, their nest eggs having been scrambled into omelettes and fed to the poor in the names of human compassion and arcane stupidity. The latter are bursting with wealth and seek only the opportunity to impress their will upon others for a 10% commission. In ancient times, the 1960s, product endorsements were not tied into media circuses. Try as they might, no Baby Boomers could find Mighty Mouse sweat shirts at the local toy emporium. That quickly changed, and the money flowed abundantly - though growth, not sustenance, is the name of the game. The taste rapidly cloyed. Barney is a saccharine pestilence. We came about full circle as the products drove the media. GI Joe and his ilk plagued the airwaves as cartoons. Corporate logos emblazon every manner and form of clothing, collectibles, mugs... the whole mercantile world is a billboard. It is still not enough! Have you ever seen a racing car driver and his vehicle? An unquenchable urgency for huge cash disbursements to defray the cost of hardware stokes a monstrous dependence upon endorsements and patronage. Fabric and paint are hardly to be seen, buried as they are beneath so many sponsors' strident logos. Generations X and Y sense their looming lifelong ruination and arrive at the same desperate conclusion: Need cash; need cash now; need lots of cash now and forever and ever! What substance of value can they offer in trade? The Third world already has a lock on corneas and organs. Even a small tattoo or branding costs a hundred dollars. The price rises as more than the square of the art's dimensional increase. Good trade awards profits in both directions. If flesh is to be mortified, why not with the Pepsi logo - for free! - plus say $10/month for life as long as the tattoo is retained unaltered? We have seen the future and it works. SKINVERTISING! Disaffected youth could secure permanent incomes of hundreds of Skinvertising dollars a month merely for surrendering in trade the blank canvas of their bodies to the insatiable hunger for our attention of advertising. A carefully planned body suit of colors could net its proprietor a cumulative lifetime sinecure of hundreds of thousands of dollars with less chronic inconvenience than that of sitting through twelve minutes of advertising every TV hour. A McDonalds' facial tattoo could be the difference between a twenty year old youth presenting 20% fat hamburger or a porterhouse steak at the supermarket checkout counter. Advertisers have within their grasp the most visible and permanent advertising campaign in history, relegating legendary Burma Shave signs to a historical footnote. Think of the persuasion they could exert as a family of fundamentally dysfunctional people feels the mounting needs of medical bills, mortgage, leaking roof, car payments, credit card invoices, dental braces... "Honey, we have to give your bikini line to New Blue Ajax; the kids need their braces tightened and my chest is already covered." As huge segments of the population seek to cash in on the Skinvertising opportunity there will not be enough quality tattoo artists to go around. Rampant unemployment among those engineers and computer programmers formerly retained within the defense production sector will be solved. CAD/CAM digital dermal embroidery will restore full employment and five axis mobility to practitioners of precision engineering and manufacturing. They can do the test runs on themselves, assuring spending money in the here and now plus continuing pensions after retirement. With the Grunge Generations taken carefully in hand to cheerfully walk in the footsteps of Hippies co-opted into Yuppies, the United States will again be assured of an indentured cohort of parents to perpetuate the System. Now, there is a product worth owning!